Re: the " 'official' point of view" expressed by kernelnewbies.org regarding reiser4 inclusion

Adrian Ulrich
2006-07-31T16:00:01Z

Hello Matthias,

> This looks rather like an education issue rather than a technical limit.

We aren't talking about the same issue: I was asking to do it
on-the-fly. Umounting the filesystem, running e2fsck and resize2fs
is something different ;-)

> Which is untrue at least for Solaris, which allows resizing a life file
> system. FreeBSD and Linux require an unmount.

Correct: You can add more inodes to a Solaris UFS on-the-fly if you are
lucky enough to have some free space available.

A colleague of mine happened to create a ~300gb filesystem and started
to migrate Mailboxes (Maildir-style format = many small files (1-3kb))
to the new LUN. At about 70% the filesystem ran out of inodes; Not a
big deal with VxFS because such a problem is fixable within seconds.
What would have happened if he had used UFS? mkfs -G wouldn't work
because he had no additional Diskspace left... *ouch*..

> Well, such "silly limitations"... looks like they are mostly hot air
> spewn by marketroids that need to justify people spending money on their
> new filesystem.

Have you ever seen VxFS or WAFL in action?

> But even then, I'd be interested to know if that's a real problem for systems
> such as ZFS.

ZFS uses 'dnodes'. The dnodes are allocated on demand from your
available space so running out of [di]nodes is impossible.

Great to see that Sun ships a state-of-the-art Filesystem with
Solaris... I think linux should do the same...

Regards,
Adrian